The TDP of the i3-3225 is 55W, and the TDP of the HD 7750 is 55W. That leaves 50W for all of the rest of the stuff in an absolutely worst case scenario, and the rest of the stuff should draw under 20W in that worst case scenario. It should be fine as long as the PSU is decent quality.

The specsindicate 10Amps on the +12V. Not awesome, but I can't recall seeing too many square PSU's like that, so it is what it is.

Bleh, I completely forgot about that. I'm used to modern quality power supplies that can put 99%+ of their entire rating out on the 12V rail, since they use DC-DC subsystems hanging off the 12V to supply 5V and 3.3V, as opposed to the older group regulated (and worse) designs.

10A gats you 120W, and everything in a modern system pretty much entirely depends on the 12V rail for power - the CPU and videocard only draw from 12V. Still, if it actually is quality, it'll work, just without much margin at worst case draw for other 12V stuff like multiple HDDs or big fans.

Intel's TDP is rubbish anyway. My main rig has an i5-3350P, which has a TDP of 55W. Asus AI Suite's EPU program reports the CPU to be using 28W of power, and that's running at 100% load at 3.3GHz (slight overclock being performed automatically by the Asus P8Z77-M Pro board) mining Litecoins.

I don't mean to be rude with this question, but why do you need a discrete GPU in an HTPC? The HD4000 should be plenty for 1080p playback and casual gaming (I used mine to stream HD content from the NAS and do game emulation without issue -- I have since moved to a NUC/openelec).

ut why do you need a discrete GPU in an HTPC? The HD4000 should be plenty for 1080p

Aside from Intel's 24hz refresh rate bug, you mean? That's the one thing holding me back right now from building an HTPC with the Intel integrated graphics, I'm waiting for Haswell to see if that gets fixed (which I doubt).

My main reason is using a discrete GPU just plain looks better. I don't know if it's just a configuration problem, but everything just has less banding using a GT610 or HD7750 than it does on the HD4000.

I run an iGPU (HD1000 from a G620 Pentium) on my bedroom HTPC, and it works fine. It is a ancient old 32" Toshiba TV that does do 1080p, but it looks awful with everything I plug in to it, so the iGPU doesn't look any worse than anything else.

On the main TV (a non-name 42" 1080p LCD) the nVidia and ATI cards give a considerably more pleasurable viewing experience than the HD4000.

I think the main problem is Intel's control panel sucks donkey balls, really.

Back OT, I'm running the machine with the GT610 - I still prefer the image quality of the nVidia card, so specs are as follows: